Blog Blather Bubbles Leading To Search Opportunity Bubbles?
Perhaps my bubble-prayer is starting to be answered. A few days ago, the search engine Baidu IPO did an IPO-party like it's 1999!. This connects very interestingly with all the recent examination of blog search
Back at the start of the development of censorware, people would sometimes say to me: "Seth, if you think censorware programs are so bad, why don't you work on making better censorware?". I always opposed that line of thought, for reasons others may have thought dogma or abstract morality, but I thought were predictable bad consequences. Since the problem itself was fundamentally flawed, it was just going to further entangle civil-libertarians in touting censorware (I turned out to be right, but that did me little good).
I didn't want to sell snake-oil to people, even if it was slightly less toxic snake-oil than other brands. But search algorithms aren't snake-oil. A small incremental improvement has value. Sometimes much value.
And remember, it's pretty apparent these days that I don't have much of a future in activism/law/policy. As well as won't ever get out of the Z-list of blogging. I can't sell that snake-oil either (link omitted out of self-preservation ...).
Nothing is guaranteed success. But I really like nontrivial odds of potentially being a millionaire much better than being marginalized or even ultimately a defendant.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in cyberblather | on August 08, 2005 11:51 PM (Infothought permalink)
